Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I went through a few comment-related plugins in the WordPress plugin directory.  It’s amazing how much cool stuff is written and uploaded over there.  Here are just a few to give you an idea of what you can find and install on your blog:

• WP AJAX Edit Comments - this plugin can be used to allow people, who comment on your blog to edit their comments.  They don’t even have to be logged in, and they will still be able to edit their own comments for a period of time.  Also, this plugin provides some nice functionality for blog administrators and moderators, who can approve, delete, or mark comments as SPAM from the post at the blog, rather than from the email message or blog administration interface.  I have installed this plugin, and you, my dear visitors, should be able to fix your own typos now.  Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.
•  CommentLuv - this plugins helps blog owners to give back some love to those who comment on their blogs. When a person leaves a comment on your blog, CommentLuv plugin navigates to this person’s web site (the one that was mentioned in the comment form), looks for an RSS feed of that site, and, if it finds the feed, gets the latest post from it.  It then appends a link to that latest post to the person’s comment. I tried this plugin and it works very well.  However, I decided to not use it here just yet - not because of the plugin quality, but because of the general way I see discussions here.  I’ll probably use this plugin on one of my other blogs.
• Ajax Comment Posting - this plugin makes comment posting a little bit faster.  It avoids the page reload for when the comment is posted.  I’ve installed this plugin on this blog, but somehow I still don’t see it working.  If you notice that it works or, on the contrary, it breaks something for me, please let me know.
• Delink Comment Author - this plugin helps in those cases, when someone posts a nice comment to your blog, that you want to approve, but don’t for the link that author of the comment used as their web site. With this plugin, you can remove the link to the comment author’s web site via comment administration of your blog.  I have installed this plugin too, and it seems to work exactly as advertised.

And now is a really good time to see if the comments on this blog still work for you.  I’ve tried to test things out and make sure that everything is OK, but to be on the safe side - you should too.  Please, leave a comment to this post and let me know if it works or if something is broken.  If comments don’t work at all for some reason, please drop me a line using any other way.

Mashable reports that source code for Movable Type is finally open sourced.  Movable Type is a blogging platform competing with WordPress, LiveJournal, and others.

These are, of course, good news for open source community.  The more open source software we have, the better.  And Movable Type is a somewhat high profile piece of software.  It used to be more popular a little while ago, and then many of its fans moved to WordPress and other alternatives.

One thing I wanted to note together with these news, is that it’s not only about open source.  Just putting up the code out there for the general public to grab and modify it is not enough.  It’s about the community too.  Someone has to lead, support, and inspire people to try, test, develop, document, and praise.  Someone has to listen and react.  This last part is one of the most difficult tasks in open source development.  And there are plenty examples to prove it (just look at most of the stuff at Freshmeat.net or SourceForge.net).

WordPress guys are terrific at driving their community.  With Six Apart manage to compete with that?  We’ll see…

If, for some reason, you don’t like the editor of your blogging tool (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc), you have a few options to consider.  Those of you hosing your own blogs, can always try a plugin or two.  WordPress, for example, has a number of plugins which either add pieces of functionality or completely replace the default editor.  Alternatively, you can try an external editor.  That is, you can use a piece of software which is not a part of your blogging platform, for writing posts.  There are Firefox plugins (ScribeFire, Xinha Here!), standalone applications (w.bloggar, Windows Live Writer, and more, and more), and web services (Performancing.com) that do this.

Today I was reminded, that one can even use Google Docs for this purpose.  Create a new document or spreadsheet, edit it all you want and then publish it straight into your blog.  That’s how easy it is.  (You’ll need to configure a few simple settings the first time you do so though).  If it sounds interesting, check this post at Blogopreneur.com fordetailed instructions.  If it sounds interesting, but you are not sure if your blogging platform is supported, check out this list of supported platforms.

Me? I am happy with WordPress built-in editor.

Earlier this year, when I was a start-up co-owner, I was trying all sorts of different ideas on how to keep web oriented technology company alive.  One of the ideas along the way was cheap and fast web design, using well-established platform (yes, you guessed it right, WordPress).  This one was among my favorites …

Eventually, the start-up didn’t survive.  And I am not much sad about it.  It was a fair try and I learned a lot from the experience.  But that idea … I liked it so much that it was painful to see it die.

Today, I learned that the idea actually works.  And not only it just works, but it’s a base of a successful business.  These are some good news for me - failing to implement a good idea properly sounds less silly to me than trying to implement a broken idea.

Blogging Pro runs an interview with Chris Garrett, owner of The 449.

I am still polishing a few things here and there on this site. If you don’t follow my Twitter stream, then here is a quick update for you since I wrote about it the last time.

• Installed 404 Notifier plugin. When somebody hits a non-existing page on my site (Error 404 - Not Found), I get an email telling me which page was missing, from where the visitor came, and what browser he used. Since I don’t have the time to monitor my web server logs closely, it was often that I missed something and didn’t know about it. Now, this plugin tells me if I need to fix something. First few days were a real something for my Inbox, but it seems that things are slowing down. Most of the stuff has been fixed and now it’s mostly notifications from SPAM bots and references from some really old web sites.
• Installed Search Unleashed plugin (and removed Search Hilight plugin). Search Unleashed provides an extended (and much needed) functionality for WordPress searching. First of all, it does plenty of highlighting. When you search for something on this site, or if you came to this site from search results of one of the major search engines, you’ll see your query highlighted on the page. Secondly, Search Unleashed extends searching with patterns. So instead of searching for “Limassol” and then “Limasos”, you can now search for “Limas*”. You can also use quotes to search for an exact phrase. And you can even use some logic operators. If you are interested in these things, check plugin’s page for more information.
• Installed WP-Cache plugin. This one should have improved the speed of the site quite a bit. Unfortunately, I can’t make sure of that myself, as my Internet connection is the real bottleneck. However, I do have a feeling that loading of the front page is a bit faster. On the other hand, I get a feeling that posting a comment now is a bit slower. If you noticed any speed changes here in the last few days, please let me know in the comments.
• Installed Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator plugin. This one should help Google (and a couple of other search engines that support the standard) to index the web site better. Hopefully, this will bring more people to the site and increase the number of comments we have here.
• Installed WP_PingPreserver plugin. I often publish posts with links to a few previous articles, and when I do it, only the first of the articles gets a pingback. With this plugin, all of the linked articles should be pinged.
• Fixed Google Analytics code. Now my statistics will work again and I’ll know better who visits the site, when, from where, and why. Spotting problems will also be much easier.
• Fixed plenty of links. Mostly these were links to my old photo albums. Before, I used to have them on my server, but then moved them to my Flickr photo stream. The links in the old posts were broken until recently. Now you’ll be redirected to the appropriate section in my Flickr archives.
• Added protection from some major SPAM bots and other “bad guys”. This was done through .htaccess file with many of the tips coming from this article. If you suddenly get a “Forbidden” error message or get redirected somewhere that you shouldn’t, please let me know via comments. If comments don’t work for you, send me an email, SMS, or IM.

Update: Oh, and I’m still moving things around the sidebars.  This should stop eventually…